New update: my current setup is a dell power edge t310 with 6x4tb SAS, zeon CPU, and 12gb ECC all parts stock. No hardware raid. 2.5gb network card. Should I just replace the 6 drives? With larger capacities? That will probably be more than $10/tb… I didn’t buy the 16 drives yet, they are used SAS drives 4tb each, turn to be about $40 each.
Current storage 8tb used out of 14… And lots of cold drives waiting to get copied… 10tb+ probably. Is it worth copying all the cold storage drives to the redundant nas.
Update: budget(200-600), the reason for the build is I found cheap 4tb drives for almost $10/Terabyte. So I want to use as much of them as I can
I am trying to build my final NAS build as a beginner.
I have a 6x4tb dell server, but it’s not enough.
I am currently trying to build the final boss of my nasses. 4x16tb with truenas with raid
I am unsure of what parts to buy as I am a complete beginner.
I found a case that can hold all 14 drives.
I need a motherboard, CPU, ram, PSU
I am on a budget, kind of.
What motherboard do you recommend? Pulled from a workstations with CPU and ram? A server board? Normal consumer with normal consumer CPU? Motherboard should have some pcie slots for 2 sata cards and one 2.5 GB card.
What CPU to run all these drives?
What ram and how much? 16? 32? Ecc, non ecc? Ddr4? Ddr3?
Power supply: 850w or more?
All parts should be able to support the 16 drives with headroom…
I would appreciate any help on this build, I want to build this as soon as possible.
Thanks
You say you are on a budget. Yet you talk about 128 Gigs of ram.
Maybe you should clarify what your budget is.
Maybe the budget was planned out before RAM prices spiked. 128 gigs of used server RAM was not that expensive before that happened.
Why 16 drives? Do you already have 16 4tb drives?
I also went with 16 drives, but they were 20TB each. OP, if you don’t already have those 4tb drives, reconsider the amount and sizes. 4tb can’t be the price sweet spot for HDDs…
It would seem that the sweet spot for HDDs is as high as 16 to 24 TB at the moment (at least here in the Netherlands).
You can get a 24TB Seagate Barracuda for €479,- right now, which comes out to about €20 / TB.If you specifically want a NAS drive though the best “bang for the buck” appears to be a 28TB Seagate IronWolf Pro for €688,- coming out to about €25 / TB.
Edit: Personally I run 8TB drives in my server, which are currently €209,- (€26 / TB) for a regular Seagate Barracuda, and €289 (€36 / TB) for a Seagate IronWolf Pro. Funnily enough 4TB drives would actually be better for NAS drives at €132,90 (€33 / TB) for a WD Red Plus.
It’s better to buy 4x 16-20TB drives and expand storage instead of buying 16 4TB drives. Also 16 3.5 inch HDD drives draw around 200W of power alone.
You’re talking a lot of storage - it might be worth investing in some low-end server hardware. A Dell tower or something, maybe one off eBay if you’re looking to cut costs.
I picked up a PowerEdge T110II a long time ago and it’s been… flawless. Just a simple server with a 4x4TB RAID5. No hardware problems (aside from occasional disk failures over the years), easy to manage. It costs a bit more - but server hardware is often just more reliable and for a NAS that’s job #1. This server just runs.
I just upgraded the memory in it to 32GB for ~$100USD. Before that it had 8GB. I needed more for restic doing backups. I probably could have gotten away with 16GB but I figured I’d max it out for that price.
Honestly, I bet it would be cheaper to replace a few of the 4 TB drives in your current set up with larger drives.
Ehhh one thing I’ve learned over the years, it doesn’t matter how much storage I buy. Within a few weeks it’ll be full.
Hey, you basically defined my system.
Truenas scale machine running 4x 16TB drives. I use a cheap rosewill 4u server rack case. It has hot swap drive bays in front. Big plus.
The brain is an amd 5950x running on an asrock x570 steel legend w/ 128GB of the cheapest crucial DDR4 ECC I could find. Also running an rtx 2080 for jellyfin transcoding.
My consumer mobo is the bottleneck. Given how my end goal is to have a 10gb nic and an LSI card for more sata ports, I’m going to have to get creative with m.2 ports. I might plug a 10gb nic into an m.2 port.
PSU was a 1kW fractal platinum rated. Way overkill, but the high efficiency is key.
You’ll notice my build uses a lot of gaming parts - i simply harvested my old parts when I upgraded my gaming PC. Despite this, it still idles under 200 watts. My point is not that you should seek out gaming parts, but if you happen to have any on hand, they could be effectively leveraged given price increases on new parts.
The biggest thing is: Use ECC. This is non negotiable for your setup. ECC saved me a couple weeks ago when my 5950x shot craps, randomly. So far no issues after increasing to a set voltage. ZFS and ECC go together like peas in a pod.
There is no real clarification what that budget is, so I will assume that the budget is tight. My advise is assuming that you are looking for the best bang for the buck.
The case looks like a good option, assuming that those are 3.5 inch bays.
It should give you plenty of space for expansion in the future if you want to do thatRAM prices are pretty nuts right now, so I would definitely not go balls to the wall with 128 GB of RAM.
16 GB of RAM should be more than plenty for a NAS server. Maybe you can even get away with 8GB?
I’m using 16 GB of DDR3 RAM in my own NAS server (which is also running Jellyfin and Nextcloud) and it’s running fine.Speaking of DDR3… Have you considered buying your CPU, motherboard and RAM second hand?
From what I hear the prices of DDR3 RAM are not nearly as elevated as those of DDR4 and DDR5 RAM, and DDR3 is plenty sufficient for a simple NAS.Be sure not to skimp on the power supply. Most consumer power supplies are not built for running a NAS worth’s of HDDs.
I’m running a Corsair RM550x in my server, which is capable of supplying 130W on the 5V rail.Good luck with your server build!
Have a look at the guides in serverbuild.net forums such as https://forums.serverbuilds.net/t/guide-nas-killer-5-0/
The series of post that is Nas killer (4.0 5.0 6.0) etc. they list a bunch of CPUs and motherboards with approx eBay prices along with ram disks etc etc. I used it as a reference when building my cheap Nas for home, mainly the motherboard/CPU sections.
I have never build a machine like that, so I guess I can’t help you much, but like another comment said, it seems like a pain to maintain, I usually have trouble with sata cables losing contact, with that setup there are many cables keen to lose contact.
As for ram I wouldn’t worry about it at all, unless you use zfs 4GB should be more than enough, even 2 or less. Ram is expensive now, so you may want to consider using as little as possible unless you already have it laying around. Does truenas use zfs? If so you may want to use other fs like btrfs or test how well zfs works with the ram you have. I’m not sure zfs is worth the trouble. I wouldn’t buy extra ram.
As for CPU I don’t think it matters much, but like I said, I have never tried your setup. But even an ancient sandy bridge should work fine if it’s just a personal has, with HDDs even with encryption. Works fine on my nas.
Also, if you have access to free old computers you can try a ghetto setup where each each computer only handles 4 drives and then you join them together on a master computer either via nbd or nvme other Ethernet (works on sata too). But that seems like an even bigger pain to maintain and increases your power consumption by a lot.